At that instant either his foot slipped or the brick gave way beneath his heel. He heard himself loose a yell of alarm, which panicked the birds lining the sill. They were up and off, their wing beats ironic applause, as he flailed on the wall. His panicked gaze went first to his feet, then to the yard below.

No, not the yard; that had disappeared. It was the carpet he saw. It had been entirely unrolled, and it filled the yard from wall to wall.

What happened next occupied mere seconds, but either his mind was lightening fast, or the moments played truant, for it seemed he had all the time he needed…

Time to appreciate the startling intricacy of the design laid out beneath him: an awesome proliferation of exquisitely executed detail. Age had bled brightness from the colors of the weave, mellowing vermilion to rose, and cobalt to chalky blue, and here and there the carpet had become threadbare, but from where Cal teetered the effect was still overwhelming.

Every inch of the carpet was worked with motifs. Even the border brimmed with designs, each subtly different from its neighbor. The effect was not overbusy; every detail was clear to Cal’s feasting eyes. In one place a dozen motifs congregated as if banded together; in another, they stood apart like rival siblings. Some kept their station along the border; others spilled into the main field, as if eager to join the teeming throng there.

In the field itself, ribbons of color described arabesques across a background of sultry browns and greens, forms that were pure abstraction – bright jottings from some wild man’s diary – jostling with stylized flora and fauna. But this complexity paled beside the centerpiece of the carpet: a giant medallion, its colors as various as a summer garden, into which a hundred subtle geometries had been cunningly woven, so that the eye could reach each pattern as flower or theorem, order or turmoil, and find each choice echoed somewhere in the grand design.

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